Wow, I met Derek Miller at Gnomdex and a couple other places. Maryam has been following his blog and told me his blog hit her hard today. I went and looked and he’s blogging his experiences with stage 4 colon cancer. The doctors gave him about the worst news one can get yesterday. His post today was titled “dead man walking” and that’s the harshness of it.

His posts bring life into sharp focus. Derek, I hope I get to have another conversation with you. Your posts are inspiring. YOU are inspiring!

Maryam said that Derek’s attitude is always uplifting, that he always seems to have the best attitude in the room. She asked me why does this happen to the nice people? She also noted that Derek and her are the same age (both are seven years younger than me which puts this into even sharper focus — I’ve already been given a gift of five years longer than the doctors gave Derek).

I don’t know but I sure am glad Derek is with us and sharing what life is about.

Think you’ve had bad traveling days? This guy gets back at Delta by recording his worst travel day. As seen on the Consumerist blog. Of course I also put this on my link blog (it’s the only non-tech thing I’ve put there in a while).

Lots of my friends are watching movies that they’ve downloaded illegally off of Bittorrent. I don’t use Bittorrent because I don’t believe in stealing content. So, I’ve been looking for an alternative way to get long-form content onto my computer and my Apple TV so that I can watch movies that might not be on Netflix yet.

When I saw Jaman at the Demo conference this year I saw a major part of the answer.

Now, Jaman is only for independent films. You won’t find Spiderman on it. But you’ll find “mid-tail” content including what you’ll probably see at a film festival like Sundance.

Or, maybe you’re looking for films that come from outside our culture. My wife is Iranian, for instance, and her mom likes watching Iranian films. Jaman has several of those that I can download and let her watch when she comes over. Hey, gotta keep the mother-in-law happy, right?

Anyway, I love Jaman and it’s bringing me movies I never thought I’d watch into my home. Here’s a look with Jaman’s CEO that I recorded for ScobleShow.

If you like indie films, or discovering films that you might not see at your local theater screens you’ll love Jaman.

Oh, and look at the use of community interation on Jaman to help bring the better films to the top. Really great stuff that every geek working on Social Media should check out.

You might have heard the hype about Justin.tv. He’s the kid in San Francisco who wears a live streaming camera. Now he’s getting other people to wear them too. I saw Brian Solis with one and more are coming. Chris Pirillo is using competing network Ustream.tv to do a live video show. It’s most excellent, to tell you the truth. Justin is fun to watch once in a while too, especially when he gets access to events that we can’t get access to like Tim O’Reilly’s Foocamp which happened last weekend. There’s also live streaming Veodia (I have a video with them on ScobleShow), Blogtv.com, and a few others coming. Jennifer Jones has an interview with one of the Ustream founders that’s worth a listen to if you care about this stuff.

But, and it’s a big but, these services will never get a huge number of people using them. Why not?

Cause most people don’t want to look like a dork wearing a camera and carying a backpack full of gear and making sure that you’re broadcasting properly and all that. I know, I tried it.

Here’s some problems with the live streaming, otherwise known as “life streaming.”

1) Most people don’t like being on live TV. I noticed this when I did my own live streaming shows. Aim a camera at some people and they’ll be nice for a few minutes, but won’t be half as interesting on camera as they are off, and they almost always tell me afterward that they didn’t appreciate having a live camera shoved in their face. One guy, while I was standing around at Supernova, told me that if I invited Justin over while we were talking that he’d stop talking to me.
2) Most people’s lives are 99% boring. Even mine. I’m sitting here typing on a computer. You want to watch THAT? Really? I don’t think so.
3) If you care about your audience and care about building it you’ll start “spicing up” the boring parts of your life. That leads to abnormal behavior. This works for Chris Pirillo because, well, he’s abnormal when the camera ISN’T on. Just kidding Chris, bu I think he’d agree that he’s pretty damn energetic all the time.
4) Most people just want to share a few seconds of their kids with their friends on a video service.

The problem with Kyte is that it’s too hard to figure out how to use. Why do I need to click on a button called “Produce on this Channel” and then drag a video camera onto the TV screen just to get to the point where I can record my own video? From this aspect Ustream and Justin.tv’s platform are way ahead of Kyte.

But, I think Kyte will figure out that simplicity matters and then you’ll see Kyte pass right by the live video streaming folks.

This is why I think Kyte.tv is going to be the way that most of us share video on the Internet in a “live/interactive” way (which is what separates it from YouTube). But, I might be wrong. Maybe we’ll all join the borg and the Justin.TV revolution. What do you think?

I thought it was just me. Firefox has been hanging on me, refusing to load Web pages, partially loading Web pages, and other stuff that’s just been making my life very frustrating. So, I went off to Twitter and asked if anyone else is having the same problems. Lo and behold they are. Tons of people say they are having problems. Are you?

The reason I can’t use Safari for everything is it is DAMN SLOW on Google Reader. I mean DAMN SLOW. Can I say that again? DAMN SLOW. I wish the Safari team would figure that out then I wouldn’t need Firefox at all. I’ll go try Camino or something else.